I know this will get a bunch of people all fired up but to be completely honest I have never really bought into the theory of global warming. Does this mean I don’t think we should be trying to be less dependent on oil? Not at all. Does it mean I don’t believe we should be working overtime to develop a more economical means of transportation and one that pollutes less? Of course not.

Granted I am only in my fifties, but even though I grew up on a ranch along the southwestern coast of Oregon where it seems to rain most of the year when compared to other states, having a good understanding of weather patterns was simply a part of life. It was not uncommon for me as a boy to hear old-timers talk of droughts as well as stories that took the opposite approach like, “I remember the year when it rained for 6 weeks straight.” and so on. Over the last 40 years I can remember major weather changes and yes even ones that affected the ice packs, the rise of the tides on our beaches, adverse effects on crops, timber and even wildlife. While some years were worse than others and with all the talk of global warming I am always alarmed how so many could forget about events that have happened as recently as the last 100 years that were far worse than anything than those who defend the theory of global warming would have you believe. For example, during the 30’s Americans and Canadians suffered what was known as “The Dust Bowl.” One of my favorite writers was John Steinbeck who wrote “The Grapes Of Wrath”. While Steinbeck’s work was just a story based on some facts, in fact the Great Dust Bowl was a reality based on many facts, a reality that drove many from their homes and destroyed lifes and furthermore affected the lives of countless others as a result.

NASA and colleagues used a computer model developed with modern-era satellite data to look at the climate over the past 100 years. The study found cooler than normal tropical Pacific Ocean surface temperatures combined with warmer tropical Atlantic Ocean temperatures to create conditions in the atmosphere that turned America’s breadbasket into a dust bowl from 1931 to 1939. These changes in sea surface temperatures created shifts in the large-scale weather patterns and low level winds that reduced the normal supply of moisture from the Gulf of Mexico and inhibited rainfall throughout the Great Plains. All the problems which caused The Dust Bowl went away and it was without Al Gore and there was no reduction of fuel consumption or any less factories or industrialisation. Simply put, some years are worse than others and there are other factors that come into play as well.

Now here is an explanation I can buy in to… According to an article in INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY, titled The Sun Also Sets, not every scientist is part of Al Gore’s mythical “consensus.” Scientists worried about a new ice age seek funding to better observe something bigger than your SUV — the sun.

Back in 1991, before Al Gore first shouted that the Earth was in the balance, the Danish Meteorological Institute released a study using data that went back centuries that showed that global temperatures closely tracked solar cycles.

To many, those data were convincing. Now, Canadian scientists are seeking additional funding for more and better “eyes” with which to observe our sun, which has a bigger impact on Earth’s climate than all the tailpipes and smokestacks on our planet combined.

And they’re worried about global cooling, not warming.

Kenneth Tapping, a solar researcher and project director for Canada’s National Research Council, is among those looking at the sun for evidence of an increase in sunspot activity.

Solar activity fluctuates in an 11-year cycle. But so far in this cycle, the sun has been disturbingly quiet. The lack of increased activity could signal the beginning of what is known as a Maunder Minimum, an event which occurs every couple of centuries and can last as long as a century.

Such an event occurred in the 17th century. The observation of sunspots showed extraordinarily low levels of magnetism on the sun, with little or no 11-year cycle.

This solar hibernation corresponded with a period of bitter cold that began around 1650 and lasted, with intermittent spikes of warming, until 1715. Frigid winters and cold summers during that period led to massive crop failures, famine and death in Northern Europe.

Tapping reports no change in the sun’s magnetic field so far this cycle and warns that if the sun remains quiet for another year or two, it may indicate a repeat of that period of drastic cooling of the Earth, bringing massive snowfall and severe weather to the Northern Hemisphere.

Tapping oversees the operation of a 60-year-old radio telescope that he calls a “stethoscope for the sun.” But he and his colleagues need better equipment.

In Canada, where radio-telescopic monitoring of the sun has been conducted since the end of World War II, a new instrument, the next-generation solar flux monitor, could measure the sun’s emissions more rapidly and accurately.

As we have noted many times, perhaps the biggest impact on the Earth’s climate over time has been the sun.

For instance, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Solar Research in Germany report the sun has been burning more brightly over the last 60 years, accounting for the 1 degree Celsius increase in Earth’s temperature over the last 100 years.

R. Timothy Patterson, professor of geology and director of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Center of Canada’s Carleton University, says that “CO2 variations show little correlation with our planet’s climate on long, medium and even short time scales.”

Rather, he says, “I and the first-class scientists I work with are consistently finding excellent correlations between the regular fluctuations of the sun and earthly climate. This is not surprising. The sun and the stars are the ultimate source of energy on this planet.”

Patterson, sharing Tapping’s concern, says: “Solar scientists predict that, by 2020, the sun will be starting into its weakest Schwabe cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on Earth.”

“Solar activity has overpowered any effect that CO2 has had before, and it most likely will again,” Patterson says. “If we were to have even a medium-sized solar minimum, we could be looking at a lot more bad effects than ‘global warming’ would have had.”

In 2005, Russian astronomer Khabibullo Abdusamatov made some waves — and not a few enemies in the global warming “community” — by predicting that the sun would reach a peak of activity about three years from now, to be accompanied by “dramatic changes” in temperatures.

A Hoover Institution Study a few years back examined historical data and came to a similar conclusion.

“The effects of solar activity and volcanoes are impossible to miss. Temperatures fluctuated exactly as expected, and the pattern was so clear that, statistically, the odds of the correlation existing by chance were one in 100,” according to Hoover fellow Bruce Berkowitz.

The study says that “try as we might, we simply could not find any relationship between industrial activity, energy consumption and changes in global temperatures.”

The study concludes that if you shut down all the world’s power plants and factories, “there would not be much effect on temperatures.”

But if the sun shuts down, we’ve got a problem. It is the sun, not the Earth, that’s hanging in the balance.